To wit, British media artist Kaffe Matthews has designed an audio bike with huge speakers, which play animal sounds when you’re riding it through the neighbourhood where Ghent’s zoo used to be, or play dramatic soundscapes while you’re riding along the river in the scenic Visserij quarter. You hear music written by the long-forgotten composer Louis De Meester mingled with quotes by people who used to know him when you pass the house in which he lived. The city suddenly has its own soundtrack.

Bristol-based artist Duncan Speakman, meanwhile, who impressed Ghent in 2010 with his personal film experience As If It Were the Last Time, now invites you to walk through the Zuid district wearing headphones that quite literally change your perception of reality, mixing electronic music and mesmerising words with the transformed but real sound of your shoes, cars or shouts in the park. The city slowly changes into a dream, or a movie.

Paradoxically, Electrified III makes it clear that electronics can be used to make us slow down. De Groote: “The message is: Get lost in the city and turn on your ears; this is an exercise in conscious delay.”

Slowness can be particularly enjoyed through Electrified III’s third project, which is actually not electronic at all. In the small sweet shop next to Vooruit, international and multidisciplinary art collective FoAM has set up a beautiful plant investigation lab. “Botanists from a parallel universe have come here to study how we, in this world, interact with plants. This is the place where they do their research,” explains Brussels-based artist Maja Kuzmanovich.

FoAM focuses on speculative culture: “Nobody knows what the future will look like but that doesn’t mean we cannot try it out today,” Kuzmanovich says. In Borrowed Scenery, FoAM imagines what a possible future would look like if plants returned to being a central aspect of human society.

Unlike the other two projects, Borrowed Scenery still has to develop completely and needs input from the city’s inhabitants. The FoAM artists invite everyone to come into the plant lab and have a talk with them about plants and plans while drinking tea (with honey). During these two months they will be organising “urban edibles” day trips and “psycho-geo-botany” walks in the city. At the same time, they’re working on an Android app that can identify naturally growing city plants.

Until 4 November

Across Ghent

www.vooruit.be